Rubella Outbreak in Ontario

May 1, 2005 By Vaccine Choice Canada

Since the beginning of May, the media prompted by health officials, have whipped up a frenzy of fear over the rubella outbreak in western Ontario that started in a Christian religious school where a majority of students are unvaccinated. Parents who’ve refused vaccinations for their children are being accused of endangering others health; some individuals in the broadcast and print media are even calling for a blanket mandatory vaccination policy.

Under attack are fundamental rights guaranteed every individual by the Canadian Constitution; the right to exercise freedom of religion and conscience, and the right, as stipulated by Canadian Medical Law, to exercise Informed Consent when considering any medical procedure that carries a risk of injury and death. Vaccination is such a procedure!

Unfortunately, the accusations, attacks and call for suspension of the basic human right to refuse invasive medical procedures, flows from a breed of reporters who are trigger happy to pump out sensational news items, but have not put the time into researching the complexity of rubella the disease, the MMR vaccine (which contains the rubella vaccine), its side effects and impact on the epidemiology of the disease.

Rubella – A Benign Disease in Childhood

Downplayed by health officials and the media is the fact that rubella is a benign disease when contracted in childhood and confers lifelong immunity. In the pre-vaccine era, naturally occurring rubella epidemics produced immunity in about 80% of the population by 20 years of age with the added benefit that most adults, including women of childbearing age, sustained lifelong immunity to the disease.

Rather than meddling with the natural, widespread, disease-induced immunity, the vaccine could, instead, be offered to the remaining 20% who have not acquired natural immunity by adulthood. The double benefit with this strategy is that [1] we will then be able to retain the natural passive immunity gained over generations, to protect future generations, and [2] fewer people will be exposed to the genuine risks posed by indiscriminately vaccinating an entire population.

The hysteria flowing from the current rubella outbreak is an example of how public attitudes are manipulated and transformed into panic and fear once normal disease cycles are altered by one size fits all mass vaccination policies.

Rubella’s real threat is to the fetus whose mother does not have immunity and who contracts the disease in the first three months of pregnancy. This can result in miscarriage or the baby being born with CRS (congenital rubella syndrome). Today very few women of childbearing age have acquired natural immunity to rubella, and are at risk of artificial vaccine induced immunity waning in adulthood.

Throughout the posturing by health officials, the truth about the disease and the vaccine remains obscured, including the fact that when a disease outbreak occurs, because of mass vaccinations in early childhood, it now strikes the adult population more frequently, an indicator that vaccine immunity wears off and does NOT confer lifelong immunity. Furthermore the perceived reduction of CRS since the advent of mass vaccination with MMR may not be attributable to vaccination, but rather due to women opting for abortions after exposure to rubella in the first trimester of pregnancy.

Why Aren’t Vaccine Options Available?

While vaccine authorities urge everyone to get the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) to curtail the spread of the rubella outbreak, we ask, why isn’t the single virus rubella vaccine available in Ontario and the rest of Canada for those who wish to be vaccinated against rubella only, but don’t want to be injected with the triple live virus MMR vaccine which carries a higher risk of side effects? Why does the public health system deny people the choice of being able to access the single virus rubella vaccine?

A big ethical problem for a lot of people is that MMR vaccine is produced using cells originally derived from aborted human fetuses. For many, it is simply morally untenable to submit to injection of a substance contaminated with cell lines derived from abortion.

Most people who choose not to have their children or themselves vaccinated have educated themselves about vaccine risks. They know that possible injuries from rubella vaccine include arthritis and they know that MMR, the only rubella-containing vaccine available, has a long list of side effects which includes the risk of SSPE, an incurable slow brain deterioration, encephalopathy (brain inflammation) and can cause vaccine strain of measles. Do we really want to risk getting measles or brain injury while trying to prevent rubella? For the parents and researchers who have witnessed children’s neurological deterioration following MMR vaccine, it still remains a prime suspect in the epidemic of autism spectrum disorders

The MMR vaccine has not been appropriately tested for safety or carcinogenicity (its potential to cause cancer). Yet we are expected to inject this into our children, for a disease that is not even dangerous to them. For those unwilling to submit their children to artificially attenuated live virus vaccines, it makes sense to allow children to catch natural rubella, so that they gain life-long immunity to protect them during their childbearing years.

For more information on MMR vaccine adverse reactions, read the product monographs for a detailed list of side effects:

Health officials are telling the public that “Fetuses 11 weeks old or younger exposed to rubella because their mothers were never vaccinated have a 90 per cent (90%) chance of suffering serious, permanent damage to their health.”

In sharp contrast to this distorted statement, Dr. F. Edward Yazbak’s in depth analysis Vaccination, Rubella and Congenital Rubella Syndrome: Separating Fact from Fiction shows that, in the years following universal mass vaccination of children with MMR, the incidence of rubella outbreaks shifted into the adult population and the percentage of CRS cases actually increased from the pre-rubella vaccination period. That increase is rather large – from 0.1% to 5%. Included in his analysis is the 1987 Danish review of pregnant women exposed to rubella – the statistics are highly significant. Of 559 women who chose to continue their pregnancies after exposure to rubella, 520 gave birth to live babies, 111 had rubella specific IgM (21.34% infection rate). 513 babies were normal – a 91.77% healthy child outcome.

Dr. Yazbak also refers to medical citations that report women who demonstrated adequate immunity to rubella, but still gave birth to children with CRS. He points out that , maternal immunity does not always guarantee that the fetus will not develop CRS. This corroborates information provided by New Zealand researcher Hilary Butler, that human infants are vulnerable to CRS type of syndromes when exposed to various viruses during critical phases of development in early pregnancy.

All Viruses Can Cause Birth Defects

Medical people use an acronym called TORCH to define these defects says Butler. This acronym stands for:

Butler explains: The reason all these different nasties could cause almost identical defects is that viruses pull Vitamin A out of the system. If you feed a pregnant dog a diet deficient in Vitamin A (but no viruses) you will get TORCH defects in the puppies. If children in Africa who are malnourished get measles, they can go blind (as can babies born with congenital rubella effects, except in babies the blindness is permanent.). But the blindness in malnourished children is reversible with Vitamin A. The reason for these defects in babies is that in the first few weeks that a baby is forming, cells divide very quickly. One of the nutritional keys to proper cell division is vitamin A, and if a mother contracts any virus, the body uses that Vitamin A to fight the infection, but the baby keeps on forming, minus one essential building block.

The problem with this Vitamin A information is that the studies done on animals are old, and have not been recently corroborated, nor have any studies been done on pregnant women. I don’t suppose they thought it worthy of study.

According to the medical literature, if a pregnant woman gets rubella in the first 4 weeks of gestation, 30 = 50% of babies run the risk of congenital malformations. Infection between the fifth and eighth week gives a risk of 25%; and during the ninth to twelfth weeks it is 8%, giving an overall risk in the first trimester of 20%.

The logical thought, to me, is not, “That is high, have the jab”, but, “How is it that 80% of babies come through rubella in utero, in the first trimester, with no problems? What went wrong in the babies who had deformities?” I believe that diet and Vitamin A in the mother is the answer.